having binged all of the Palimpsest series and scrolled through your blog for a while, I have happily adopted the worldview that Jim and Bones clocked each other as 'the one person balls to the walls nuts enough to keep up with me' and mutually decided 'This Is My Project,' so thank you for that
Congratulations on your new and exceptionally valid worldview! It's a perennially entertaining paradigm to operate in, if you ask me.
You know, at least in pverse, I feel like it took them both a minute to get to the This Is My Project stage, mostly because they were each too fucked up upon meeting to consider themselves capable of making a positive impact on anyone else. Arguably their starting point is something more along the lines of Wow, What A Mess. ...Well, I Guess I Probably Can't Fuck Him Up Any Worse. You know? Like, if someone hands me their pristine brand-new top-of-the-line phone without a case, I’m going to be on edge the entire time I’m holding it. But if it’s already got a cracked screen, a scratched-up case, maybe a mysterious bite mark or two - I mean, I’ve got questions, first of all, but that’s none of my business and the important thing is that short of throwing that bad boy into the sun my own careless handling ain’t gonna make a dent, so I can relax a little.
Jim is that phone when he walks onto that shuttle - just an Absolute Wreck of a human being. It is pure glorious serendipity that he ends up sitting next to a guy who is a completely different but equally intense flavor of Absolute Wreck, and even more incredible that those flavors happen to pair so naturally together. (Hey, you got your chocolate in my peanut butter abandonment issues in my caretaking fixation! Yeah, well, you got your anxiety and depression in my performative overconfidence and obsessive drive!)
They don’t know that last part right away, of course. But game recognizes game, and so each of them in their own way kind of shrugs into that initial stage of their relationship - like, yeah, what the hell, I guess there’s room for one more vagrant around the roaring trash barrel fire that is my existence. Set down your bindle of barely repressed trauma and make yourself comfortable.
Both Leonard and Jim are too blindered by self-hatred, at first, to have any aspirations of helping each other, let alone consider that they themselves might be helpable. It's only once they’ve started settling into their fixer-upper of a friendship - the cartoonishly ramshackle haunted house that is their combined dysfunction - that they start looking around and going, hmm...I mean, since I'm already here...
